At McDonald’s, I saw that their sweet tea comes from a plastic bag inside a metal container, which stays in there all day. That doesn’t seem sanitary. Then I found out some places, like Olive Garden, heat soup in plastic bags by putting them in hot water. Isn’t this like leaving a water bottle in a hot car, where plastic leaches into the liquid? How is this okay? Like, I feel like that would be so explicitly illegal in other countries. Taking a big plastic bag of soup and just throwing it in water for the plastic to obviously separate from the bag and be intermingled with the food…
It sounds a lot like poison, like it’s literally poisonous. Like how is this okay in the USA?
Food company profits are more valuable than human life.
People on Lemmy will believe literally anything you tell them as long as you make it about a corporation or billionaire.
The example in the OP is very obviously food grade plastic, specifically engineered for those use cases
Ehh, kinda? I mean there is no plastic on earth that does not produce microplastics when combined with heat, but the science on how bad that is for people is very new, as plastic packaging for food is still relatively new.
We don’t know how bad or not microplastics are, but everyone is being exposed to a lot.
I’m betting hard that microplastics are actually good for us
There’s also an “acceptable risk” that companies will take. Not sure about food service, but I have been in meetings where 5% of customers fucked over is considered acceptable, with the dollar figures that follow. They probably take into account the total number of lawsuits they get for poisoning people, and the cost of the impact to the bottom line via lawsuits and bad marketing versus actually fixing the issue.
For example, if 10,000 people get food poisoning a year from iced tea, probably only a small percentage of those people will trace it back to McDonald’s iced tea WITH tangible proof. It might be easier to pay for those lawsuits than actually fixing the issue. They’ll pass some kind of memo out, showing they addressed the issue, and then blame the store management. Nothing really changes.
“A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don’t do one.”
My wife was an insurance adjuster for a major company, and that’s EXACTLY how it goes.
Which company?
Probably not collectively but for the people making these decisions it is.
Well, it depends on how much profit across how many companies we’re looking at, along with how many lives we’re comparing to. Also whose lives.
There are people who get paid to make these kinds of decisions…
Cue Zap Brannigan’s quote…